One O'clock: Still Just a Potato

I am beginning to feel as if my entire family was killed when a plane piloted by my fiance crashed into my uninsured home - and I have inoperable cancer. Basically things just keep going from bad to worse and when this happens, there's only so long that you can be patient/stoic/good-humoured about it before having a full-on emotional breakdown. However, like most of the awful things that have happened to me over the past year (coming up on my diagnosis anniversary soon - get your party hats ready people!) even good old-fashioned breakdowns have their advantages if you time them right. For example, how do you think I've managed to spend 39 of the 40 nights I've been in hospital the past year in a private room? Mostly by crying, hyperventilating and rambling nonsensically round about the time I'm being assigned a room. The one night I got stuck in a shared room, my leftover breakdown aura meant that the nurses let me sit in the TV room until 2:30am and then gave me a sleeping pill and transferred me to a private room the next day. Other strange "bright sides of cancer" that my slightly crazy best friend Halley and I have been able to come up with include my lack of ovaries saving money on sanitary products and (in future) contraception; the fact that borrowing eggs from my sister to use for IVF will make our kids both cousins and half-siblings which lends an air of soap opera drama to the situation; being able to get out of any social occasion I don't feel like going to; saving time on getting ready in the morning because of lack of hair; and my extensive wig collection possibly being useful for a future career in espionage. However, no matter how much I try to look for the silver lining and no matter how much reggaeton I listen to, this week has been so disgustingly bad that I can't help secretly wishing that some doctor had screwed something up during one of my surgeries so that I could be dead right now instead of having to try and cope with my body waging war against me. Seriously, I've never done anything particularly abusive to it, except for that month when I tried to consume all the food in Argentina, but you'd think that a lifetime of abstinence from just about everything that everyone else does would make up for that. Ungrateful bitch.

Now that I've subjected you to a very large and confusing paragraph of self-pity, I should probably fill you in on what's actually happening. I was discharged from the San on Tuesday, almost two weeks after the surgery that was supposed to get rid of the fluid from my lungs for good and give me one less thing to worry about (it didn't - I've started getting fluidy again). I spent a nice afternoon/evening eating non-hospital food and wearing clothes that weren't pyjamas before curling up in my soft non-hospital bed to get a good night's sleep before I had to go to chemo the next morning. I never made it to chemo, because I woke up in the morning very confused and with my neck so swollen it was pressing my throat closed. My arms and hands were almost twice their normal size. I made my way to the mirror and tried not to panic when I saw the grotesquely swollen face staring back at me through eyes that couldn't open more than halfway. I burst into my sister's room and squeaked out through my constricted airway that I needed to go to hospital. She broke several speed and traffic laws to get me to the Wyong Emergency Department, where I spent the next 15 hours. At first they thought I must have had an allergic reaction to something, so they stabbed me with two ineffective adrenaline injections before sending me for a CT scan and finding out that I had another blood clot, this time near my port-a-cath, which is an implant under my skin for needles to go into that's meant to stop my veins from being over-used (it has not achieved this - I have the veins of a 90-year-old junky). This of course was quite upsetting because it instantly conjured up images of surgery, trying to do chemo without a port-a-cath and being on blood thinners for the rest of my life. But what really sent me into full-on breakdown mode was the doctor coming to take yet another blood test from my ridiculously swollen arm, taking my total number of stabbings for the day up to eight. Cue sobbing and and hyperventilating. I spent the next two days at Wyong waiting to be transferred to Westmead because my oncologist wanted me down there. Not that it makes that much difference; there's more doctors here but they still can't figure out quite what to do with me. So now all there is to do is play the waiting game and watch as many episodes of The Simpsons as humanly possible.

Pretty much as soon as I was admitted to hospital, my goal was to be seen by as few people as possible because the swelling makes me feel very much like a sideshow freak. Unfortunately that turned out to be difficult at Wyong Hospital - I didn't realise how many people I knew that worked there, but they all managed to find me within the first 24 hours. It's a lot easier to manage at Westmead with my parents acting as gatekeepers. Unfortunately I will have to go home sooner or later, and with my last blood clot it took about six weeks for my swollen arm to start looking remotely normal again, and this time it's so much more of me that's swollen so I don't know how long it'll take - but I fully intend on not leaving my house for that period of time (except maybe for chemo). I know it seems silly and superficial to care so much about my appearence, but seriously, to go overnight from feeling somewhat normal to looking in the mirror and seeing a face that isn't yours and having hands so swollen that you can't hold a knife and fork properly is bound to mess with the head.

Chillin' in the Hospital

I’m getting pretty adept at being a hospital patient, this being my fifth stay in less than a year. I’ve been in a different hospital each time - it’s like I’m writing a travel guide to the hospitals of Sydney and the Central Coast. So far I’m giving the San four stars because the food is good, I have a private room and everyone is so happy all the time because they’re high on Jebus. Actually I’m going to give them an extra half a star for agreeing to sedate me whenever I ask.

Everyone has been pitying me for having to stay in hospital over the long weekend, but it’s really not so bad. There are some good things about hospitalization, like people bringing you meals, or getting to sit down while you shower (all the laziness of a bath without the grossness of soaking in your own filth). There are also a lot of ways to stay entertained in here besides morphine:

#1 Make lame jokes during your towel bath, just to make things a little more awkward.

#2 Collect medicine cups. Become distressed when anyone tries to throw them out. Last time I got 27.

#3 Bond with the nursing and food delivery staff. Reality TV can help with this:

Sample Conversation Re: The Biggest Loser

Nurse: Is it the weigh-in tonight?

Kea: Yeah, I can’t believe how skinny they are now! But won’t their skin be really stretched out from losing all that weight so quickly?

Nurse: Oh yeah, they’d definitely need to have some surgery to fix that. Especially Shannon.

Kea: He lost 8.2 kilos this week - I wish I could lose that much weight at all.

Nurse: Who do you think will get eliminated?

Kea: Well Lisa’s the bigger threat because she has more weight to lose, but she does have that injury…

There. Friends for life!

#4 Use medical supplies to make clothes for any soft toys brought in by visitors. Pose them in amusing positions.

Between this and sleeping, eating, watching TV, whinging about my ailments to my visitors and taking lots of painkillers, the time goes pretty quickly. In fact, if I had a job this would be a pretty decent (if slightly painful) holiday.